Co-Founder
Product Designer
Full stack design (end-to-end)
Facilitation
Research
Prototyping
Visual design
Growth PM
UX Researcher
4 Months
Bloom Ready provided premium office coffee services with a user-centric approach. We offered low-friction procurement by supplying brewing equipment, weekly bean delivery, and personalized support. I co-founded Bloom with Rebecca Gessler and we hit profitability in 2 years and reached 5000+ employees via organic sales and word-of-mouth.
In 2019, we decided to expand Bloom Ready beyond our base of evangelist customers. We set financial goals and determined that we couldn’t reach those numbers with our current sales model.
Having previously worked at Google, Zynga, and Yahoo!, we understood the importance of investing in office services to cultivate company culture every day and so did our base evangelist customers
We encountered challenges with expanding our target buyers. Most office managers:
Amid a crowded office coffee service market, we needed to find a turn-key growth channel that would expand our target buyers and convince office managers to take a risk on a different procurement model.
We tackled these challenges with a user-focused, hypothesis-driven strategy. Our team of 3 (Growth PM, my co-founder/UX researcher, and myself) held quarterly 2-week design sprints and planning sessions in San Francisco. We stayed connected and productive while remote thanks to tools like Miro and Sketch.
We generated hypotheses and used a 2x2 prioritization matrix to identify the biggest assumptions we were making. One crucial hypothesis was that we could proactively identify target customers and directly market to them.
Years of past research and conversion data led us to believe that offices with fewer than 70 people would be the easiest customers to scale. These accounts: use easy-to-install equipment and require fewer levels of approval for conversion. As our primary buyers were office managers, we interviewed 7 of them to better understand their needs, motivations, and purchasing behaviors.
To offer a turnkey solution we needed to increase our web presence. I facilitated a team exercise to distill our research into actionable messaging and then created a low-fidelity clickable prototype in google docs to test website content. I ran two more rounds of usability studies to rapidly iterate on the copy. Then I built landing pages in UnBounce using Google Adwords for A/B testing.
In order to achieve our business goals more efficiently, we launched a multi-channel growth campaign targeting office managers. We believed they were more likely to re-evaluate and change their office services at the beginning of the year.
We developed a multi-channel approach to reach office managers, including
We Tested 2 CTAs
I was responsible for all design from packaging and print marketing materials to banner ads, landing pages, and emails. Our PM was responsible for sourcing target companies, digital communication, and content marketing channels. Our entire team visited offices in person in San Francisco to bring brewed coffee for the teams to share and collected the empty jug the next day. This gave us two chances to talk to someone in the office.
50% reduction in sales cycle time for leads converted through this campaign vs our regular business
85% conversion rate for leads who tried a two-week trial of our service.
2x Increased conversion across all channels
By March, our growth campaign had successfully converted customers. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced offices to close and our campaign abruptly ended. Our Bloom Ready product relied on office workers going to offices. We had to rethink our business strategy and consider pivoting our product.
I am incredibly proud of the design thinking approach we developed at Bloom Ready. I hope to incorporate this hypothesis-driven process into my future teams.
Owning and running Bloom Ready has taught me how adaptable I am. I’m comfortable with ambiguity, can roll with the punches, and make calculated decisions about how to allocate our time and resources.